Miglia today announced the VideoExpress, a hardware-based video converter that enables you to turn your unprotected DVDs and QuickTime or MPEG files into H.264 video. The VideoExpress frees up the processor on your Mac while video encoding is underway, leaving you free to carry on other tasks uninterrupted. It will encode into H.264 video up to 5x faster than real time export. VideoExpress ships with a simple drag & drop interface application that only requires you to pick the destination and the quality. In addition, there is a separate QuickTime plugin that allows you to export from your favorite Mac application and use the benefits of the VideoExpress for best performance. The Miglia VideoExpress is priced at $99.

I also have an imac G4, and this would help a lot with encoding, but the downside is it says it helps to encode your "unprotected" dvds. Does that mean that you still have to rip them to your HD then re-encode them with this?_________________1.42 | 1GB | 80GB
20.1 Dell 2001FP
booting from FW 400GB ICY Dock